Haunted: Halloween '85 for NES does something similar with its sprite CHR. It emulates a sprite system with 256 16x16 CHRs, uploading two per frame to one of two buffers allocated to each entity and switching to the next animation frame only once all needed 16x16s are in place. On Super NES, it should be easier, as you don't need two buffers if no single cel needs more than 5K.

But you still need someone to draw plausible sprite cels with which to test a sprite system including this sort of OBJ-ExGrafix simulator, so that you don't end up over-relying on peculiarities of your synthetic test tiles.

You might not know your architecture is peculiar until you plug in real data and discover that it's not as flexible or efficient as you thought it'd be. It doesn't have to be final data, just representative data.

Well, I guess I would have to come up with a separate version for 8x8 & 16x16 sprites, and 16x16 & 32x32 sprites.

EDIT:I'm guessing that using 16384 16x16 would be limiting to games larger than 16-megabits. So you can fix that problem with extra SRAM, because you need a table to store the VRAM location of every sprite.

Okay, I just wrote an example code for a simple "convert arcade-style sprite attributes to SNES-style sprite attributes" system. I wonder where Espozo is, he might be interested in this.

Code:

// "CHR" is the name for the table of 14-bit (or 15-bit) ROM CHR numbers for 128 sprites.// The routine converts the 14/15-bit CHR values to the SNES's native 9-bit CHR values.// "CHR_allocation" is a table of where each 14/15-bit CHR is mapped to what VRAM slot.// Each slot has a hardcoded 9-bit CHR value// "slot_CHR" says what 14/15-bit CHR value each slot cooresponds to.// "active_slot" flags if the slot is being used or not. If $ffff, then the slot needs to be DMA'd.// "sprite size" table declares if a sprite is 16x16 or 32x32

Don't worry, I'm still alive. Could you give a summary of what this code does? I read the description at the top, and glanced at the code, but I don't understand what is going on. It sounds like you want to somehow increase the CHR size of OAM to 15 bits instead of 9, but this is a hardcoded limitation. The end of your comment says something about 16x16 and 32x32 sized slots; is this related to the system we're doing of dynamically looking for space in VRAM for sprite graphics?

I thought more about this idea, and I thought that it might be easier to do 16x16 sprites in groups of 2, for a lot of reasons:

-half of the SNES's memory space can be used for sprites.-32x32 and 16x16 sprites would have the same alignment.-All sprite pairs have a page aligned address.-DMA routine can be made more efficient. Possibly around 5kB at once without bars.

The downsides are slightly less flexible 16x16 sprites, and doing 48x48 rotating sprites would have a much more confusing mapping.

In this post, GradualGames pointed out that the asset complexity even on the NES is greater than that on the Atari 2600, and backers of an RPG Maker-style tool that targets NES are clamoring for a counterpart to the Unity engine's Asset Store. This would be even greater for the Super NES.

I talked to John (gamester81) and told him to release or sell his Justice Beaver SNES creation tools when they are done with that project. He said that he would have to talk with the SNES programmer to see if he was interested in doing it.

If people are willing to sell their own SNES homebrew tools or do kickstarters to improve or develop SNES tools it would really help the SNES homebrew community and scene.

In this post, GradualGames pointed out that the asset complexity even on the NES is greater than that on the Atari 2600, and backers of an RPG Maker-style tool that targets NES are clamoring for a counterpart to the Unity engine's Asset Store. This would be even greater for the Super NES.

Oh gawd, the Unity Asset store. How to make a game not survive a game-engine-you-didn't-write update.

We really do need some kind of "Simple"/"Retro" assembly-code game engine that can run on a NES/SNES/MD by outputting the necessary 6502/65c816/68K assembly game code/assets, that works on Higan or a real SNES/Super NT. If it can validate on the real hardware, then having a IL output (for LLVM) would let it be compiled with other machine-native engines that have the capability to display graphics and play midi/tracker style music.

At any rate, the amount of games that I see being made in Unity or GameMaker that are 2D pixel sprite games, but lack the color range, or even input responsiveness of an actual retro game kinda makes me disappointed over and over again. This isn't a call to stop making 2D sprite games in Unity, but rather these games simply don't have the retro aesthetic other than being "pixelated"

_________________I come from the net. Through systems, peoples and cities to this place.

I talked to John (gamester81) and told him to release or sell his Justice Beaver SNES creation tools when they are done with that project. He said that he would have to talk with the SNES programmer to see if he was interested in doing it.

If people are willing to sell their own SNES homebrew tools or do kickstarters to improve or develop SNES tools it would really help the SNES homebrew community and scene.

That's very interesting!

Do you know what is the base of their toolset? (ASM or C?).Did they also create some time saving tools (level editor, sprite animation manager, etc.), like the ones HihiDanni has planned for SuperFeather?

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